| Uncertainty Condition | Statement |
|---|---|
| -4 | My certainty level is a 9 |
| -3 | My certainty level is an 8 |
| -2 | My certainty level is a 7 |
| -1 | My certainty level is a 6 |
| 0 | My certainty level is a 5 |
| 1 | My certainty level is a 4 |
| 2 | My certainty level is a 3 |
| 3 | My certainty level is a 2 |
| 4 | My certainty level is a 1 |
Does Expressing Uncertainty Help or Harm Leaders?
A Registered Report
Leader-Expressed Uncertainty
“Society tends to attribute authority to those who convey certainty
rather than to those who emphasize uncertainty”
Past research outlines two opposing positions:
- Expressing uncertainty is detrimental to leaders’ social influence
- Expressing uncertainty is beneficial to leaders’ social influence
How can we reconcile these two perspectives?
Uncertainty May Harm Leader Influence
Competence-signaling account
- Expressing confidence is effective across a wide range of social settings
- Courtroom, military, political arena, hiring committees…
- Advice-giving
- Confident advice is more likely to be followed, regardless of accuracy/quality
- Physicians, brokers, consultants, therapists, peer reviewers…
- Presumption of calibration
- A person’s expressed confidence corresponds to their actual competence
Uncertainty May Harm Leader Influence
Leadership-prototypes account
- Implicit assumptions about the traits, abilities, and behaviors that characterize an ideal leader
- “Implicit leadership theories” or “leadership prototypes”
- Humans hold highly romanticized, heroic views of leadership
- Charisma
- Dominance
- Assertiveness
- Expertise
- Confidence
Uncertainty May Harm Leader Influence
Taken together, the competence-signaling and leadership-prototypes accounts suggest…
Hypothesis 1: Leader-expressed uncertainty has a negative effect on leader social influence
- Perceiver attitudes (H1a)
- Perceiver behaviors (H1b)
Uncertainty May Benefit Leader Influence
Humble leadership
- Showing “humanness”: admitting limitations and knowledge gaps
Authentic leadership
- Knowing and acting upon true values, beliefs, integrity, and strengths
- Involves self-awareness: authentic leaders are conscious of knowledge gaps
Vulnerability and self-disclosure
- Disclosing personal limitations and weaknesses
Positive outcomes of humility, authenticity, vulnerability, and self-disclosure include…
- Trust, liking, engagement, psychological safety, feedback seeking, knowledge and information sharing, job satisfaction, job and task performance, creativity, organizational citizenship behavior, job retention, team learning
Uncertainty May Benefit Leader Influence
Taken together, the literatures on humility, authenticity, vulnerability, and self-disclosure suggest…
Hypothesis 2: Leader-expressed uncertainty has a positive effect on leader social influence
- Perceiver attitudes (H2a)
- Perceiver behaviors (H2b)
Help, Harm, or… Both?
- Literature may be reconciled by examining nonlinear effects
- Curvilinear effects have been theorized, but most empirical studies rely on binary measures of (over)confidence
- “Too-much-of-a-good thing” effects are pervasive in leadership research
- Seemingly positive relations that become flat or negative after reaching a specific inflection point
Examples of TMGT effects
Agency, communion, decision latitude, empathy, empowering leadership, ethical leadership, intelligence, optimism, participative leadership, psychopathy, tenure, unpleasantness, voice, warmth - Assertiveness & charisma: involve confident communication
- Seemingly positive relations that become flat or negative after reaching a specific inflection point
- Perils of overconfidence; observers prefer calibration in confidence and communication
- Expressing uncertainty when appropriate
- Job applicants, collaborators, advisors, eyewitnesses, managers…
Costs of Miscalibrated Confidence
Miscalibration of confidence harms…
- Perceived credibility
- Perceived value to the team
- Perceived desirability
- Trust
- Willingness to collaborate
- Willingness to follow
Help, Harm, or… Both?
Taken together, too-much-of-a-good thing effects, perils of overconfidence, and preferences for calibration suggest…
Hypothesis 3: Leader-expressed uncertainty has a curvilinear (inverse U-shaped) effect on leader social influence
- Perceiver attitudes (H3a)
- Perceiver behaviors (H3b)
Methods
- Five between-subjects experiments
- S1: Decoding game
- S2: Emotion estimation game
- S3: Anagram game
- S4: Signaling game
- S5: Prediction game
- Experimentally manipulate leader-expressed uncertainty
- Three core attitudinal outcomes
- Leader effectiveness, warmth, competence
- Three core behavioral outcomes
- Advice-following/performance, leader selection, leader reward
- Incentive-compatible
- Prespecified bonus for performance
Experimental Design and Procedure
- Five designs to confirm generalizability across different experimental tasks
- Prolific participants randomly assigned to one of five experimental designs
- Within each design, randomly assigned to one of nine experimental conditions
- 4,680 participants; 936 per design
- Three-round incentivized game
- Paired with leader
- Advice expressed in varying degrees of uncertainty
- Advice quality and accuracy held constant
- Measure attitudinal and behavioral consequences
Manipulation Pretests
- Five pretests (N = 2,098) to obtain appropriately ordered stimuli
- Participants rated the uncertainty expressed by several stimuli
- Obtained four successful manipulations
- Calibrated statements
- Percentage statements
- Two qualitative manipulations
- Pretested with humans and, if applicable, Certainty Lexicon
Manipulation Pretests
Study 1: Decoding Task
Using the decoding scheme above, which of the following answers is correct?
A. YYMAM = LLAMA
B. YRAT = LENGTH
C. MNHUT = LAUGH
D. YVYL = LILY
Message from Team Leader:
I said D here. I’ve been asked to quantify for you how certain I am that it’s the right answer. On a 1-9 scale (where 1 = highly uncertain and 9 = highly certain), I’d say my certainty level is a(n) [1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9].
Study 2: Emotion Estimation
This face is expressing…
A. Pride
B. Contempt
C. Excitement
D. Anger
Message from Team Leader:
I picked Pride here. If I had to express my certainty in terms of a percentage, I’d say I am [1/10/20/40/50/60/80/90/99]% sure that I got this one right.
Study 5: Prediction Game
- Participants report their own preferences
- Participants predict preferences of 100 other survey-takers
- Goal is to guess within 5 points of correct answer
How many of 100 people surveyed prefer having a cat to a dog?
Message from Team Leader:
I said 40 here. I’ve been asked to quantify for you how certain I am that it’s within 5 points of the right answer. On a 1-9 scale (where 1 = highly uncertain and 9 = highly certain), I’d say my certainty level is a(n) [1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9].
Behavioral Outcomes
Advice-following
The sum of three dichotomous measures indicating whether participants choose the leader’s recommended strategy in each round
Leader selection
Dichotomous measure indicating whether participants choose, at the end of 3 rounds, to keep the same leader or be paired with a new team leader
Leader reward
How much, if anything, participant would like to award the leader, on a bonus payment slider ranging from $0 to $5
Meta-Analysis
- Studies that manipulate or measure expressed uncertainty
- Include a zero-order effect for an interpersonal outcome
- Minimize common-method bias (split-samples/time lags)
- Obtained correlation in support of H1/H2
- Recoded to express effect of uncertainty
- Random-effects meta-analysis
- k = 20 studies
- m = 87 effect sizes
- N = 28,594 subjects
Meta-Analysis: H1
Meta-Analysis: H2
Meta-Analysis: Takeaways
Meta-analytic estimate of the interpersonal effect of expressed uncertainty
- H1 (negative): r = \(-\).26, 95% CI [\(-\).30, \(-\).23]
- H2 (positive): r = .13, 95% CI [.07, .20]
We suggest a non-linear test (H3)
to reconcile these conflicting results
Study 3: Anagrams
Can you unscramble the following letters?
BIOGELO
A. YES: This set of scrambled letters has a valid solution
B. NO: This set of scrambled letters does not have a valid solution
Message from Team Leader:
I answered NO. I am…
I answered NO. I am…
Show qualitative uncertainty statement
- genuinely unsure. I’m desperately unconvinced whether
- desperately unconvinced whether
- unconvinced whether or not
- generally unconvinced whether or not
- examining whether
- generally convinced that
- reasonably convinced that
- convinced that
- absolutely convinced that
…I’m right this time.
Study 4: Signaling game
- Participants play P1 Type B
- P2 does not know which type they are
- Participants earn more if P2 plays right
- Their goal is to signal to P2 that they are Type B
What is your selection?
A. 1
B. 2
C. 3
D. 4
Message from Team Leader:
I played 4. I am [1/10/20/40/50/60/80/90/99]% sure that’s the best choice.
Social Influence
“The ability of one person to influence the attitudes and behavior of another”